Book review: Jessica Hinchy. 2021. Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra,c. 1850–1900

In a sea of recent scholarship on colonial regulations of gender and sexuality, Jessica Hinchy’s book Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c. 1850–1900 stands out. It is the first book-length reading of the British colonial archive pertaining to hijras (regarded as ‘eunuchs’ (p. 1)), and especially of Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act, 1871, a law that criminalised communities deemed unruly in the colonial imaginary and set them up for surveillance and regulation. Focused on eunuchs in the North-Western Provinces of British India, Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act has been under-analysed. Hinchy undertakes an impressive reading of this law and the British colonial archive to trace moral panics undergirding the production of hijras as an ungovernable criminal population that needed not merely regulation but elimination.

The book opens with a memorable account of the murder of a hijra called Bhoorah on 17 August 1852, an act that galvanised colonial concern and the resolve to ‘extirpate’ hijras (p. 100). Despite this opening—with a focus on hijra death—the remainder of the book focuses on traces of hijra life and the small acts of resistance that troubled this colonial project of hijra extermination. Based on extensive archival research in the National Archives of India, the British Library and the Uttar Pradesh State Archives, the book is made up of nine substantive chapters divided into three parts. Each part speaks to a range of arguments about moral panics and colonial governance; methodological concerns about archival production; and hijra responses to surveillance and criminalisation. In grappling with these arguments, Hinchy’s book is a singular contribution on the fragility of power and the regulations of intimacy required to ensure the consolidation of colonial rule.

The first part of the book charts the production of the ‘problem’ engendered by hijras in the North-Western Provinces in the late 19^th century and effectively highlights how gender and sexuality were key to colonial governance. While it is not the first book to make this point, it does so through the gendered/sexual regulations of hijras—which has not been an extensive focus in the historiographical literature thus far—and the contextualisation of such regulations through other forms of colonial order. Hinchy articulates not only how, as ostensible feminine‑presenting sodomites, hijras threatened colonial gender binaries and sexual norms but also how the anxiety generated by hijras’ mobility, their non-normative household structures and their apparently unproductive labour revealed these sites as important nodes for colonial regulation. This section also underscores the British colonial project as non-unitary: it was fractured and fraught, with very different, regionally specific ways in which it was instantiated, enacted and responded to. Hinchy makes this point well by focusing on the ‘eunuch problem’ (p. 7) in the North‑Western Provinces and unpacking the specificity of this provincial project alongside the active complicity of the Indian middle-class who crafted their own respectability against the figure of the criminal eunuch.

Parts 2 and 3 further unpack the fragmentary nature of colonial knowledge production. In Part 2, focused on the archive, Hinchy weaves together fragmentary ‘life histories’ with the ‘multivocality’ of the archive to interrogate the fractured processes by which hijras entered the colonial archive. In this process, Hinchy underscores not only the often partial and contradictory nature of archives, but also several important aspects of hijra life in the 19^th century, including their seasonal mobility, the fact that their economic lives were not restricted to performative practices and alms‑collection, as the literature indicates, but included agriculture and artisan craftwork. Clearly aware of the critiques of the recuperative model outlined by Ann Stoler, Anjali Arondekar and others, Hinchy nevertheless falls into some of the traps highlighted by these critiques when she suspends some of her earlier scepticism and attempts to unreflexively draw on fragments in the archive to render a ‘more textured history of Hijra lives’ (p. 14).

In Part 3, Hinchy does a wonderful job of problematising a cohesive colonial project by highlighting the many ways in which hijras eluded colonial capture. She explores how hijras and others experienced colonial governance and the everyday, contingent practices through which they maneuvered within the confines of laws, regulations and policing practices, to resist and survive. The chapters of this section highlight attempts by the colonial state to legibilise the eunuch body even as tensions between forms of medical and legal knowledge, varied policing practices and administrative disagreements allowed for many gaps in the project of eliminating hijras in the North‑Western Provinces.

Given that the enforcement of Part II of the Criminal Tribes Act depended on identifying the proper subjects of the law, much debate followed on who could be classified as a eunuch and how to make that determination. Not only were there slippages between how one prioritised sodomy, kidnapping and castration in the definition of a criminal eunuch, colonial officials also ‘discovered’ a range of people who did not conform to gender binaries, complicating an easy translation of ‘eunuch’ as ‘hijra’. Confusion persisted even after registration as a eunuch as policing and law enforcement at the local level was uneven, varied and disaggregated and it differed significantly across districts and administrative ranks. Hijras took advantage of these cracks in the colonial edifice and used everyday practices to evade colonial surveillance and capture. For example, they not only moved across borders—temporarily or permanently—but also creatively played with sartorial and performative norms to evade colonial authorities. As Hinchy notes, ‘while Hijras were criminalised due to their “disorderliness” under the Criminal Tribes Act, their refusal to fit the colonial mould of an orderly colonised subject allowed Hijras to undermine and survive the North‑Western Provinces’s scheme of elimination’ (p. 19). By highlighting the many ways in which colonial knowledge was varied, sometimes contradictory, and always incomplete across administrative ranks and how hijras responded in these fissures of the anti-eunuch campaign, Hinchy further problematises a cohesive state project in both the colonies and the metropole.

This book is a significant contribution to the literature on colonial India, which has paid scant attention to sexuality and hijras; it is a contribution to Indian sexuality studies, which has focused largely on contemporary accounts of hijras and recent efforts to repeal colonial anti-sodomy laws; and it is a contribution to the literature on archival methodology, which has rightly critiqued the recuperative model. Aspects of the book, such as disjunctures in terms of archival recuperation in Chapter 8; the relevance of provinciality in the postscript; the porosity of the hijra category against its reified boundary with other feminine-presenting categories such as zenana, potentially undercut Hinchy’s larger project and warrant attention. But these are minor critiques in an otherwise laudable, well-researched book that will be an invaluable resource not only for scholars of sexuality but for all those interested in the historiography of the British empire and methodological questions of archival production/reading.